rblinne: The recent advances in genetics pretty much prove common descent.

That flies in the face of Woese’s discoveries.

It seems you do not understand Woese's hypothesis. He certainly accepts that common descent applies for all life beyond what he calls the the Darwinian Threshold. And the science certainly supports this assertion.

As a cell design becomes more complex and interconnected a critical point is reached where a more integrated cellular organization emerges, and vertically generated novelty can and does assume greater importance.

"Vertically generated novelty" means natural evolution by common descent. That would mean the common descent of humans with apes, with fish, and even with fig trees. And before the Darwinian Threshold? Woese proposes natural evolution by horizontal gene transfer.

Kimura showed Darwinism is not the principal mechanism in molecular evolution.

But Kimura did not show or imply that most adaptation was due to neutral evolution, or that natural selection wasn't important to the history of evolutionary change. Neutral theory is an elegant theory that makes specific testable predictions. Naive neutral theory has been supplanted by new research which indicates that even nearly neutral mutations are subject to natural selection.

I almost missed this lame post about a guy who was an expert in determining whether stacks of stones are man-made or not. Says DaveScot:

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It’s a good example of how the design inference has been employed for practical matters.

Actually, it's a good example of how design is inferred without using the bogus methods propounded by the DI fellows. And why do IDers always say "the design inference" when, in fact, all kinds of different design inferences are drawn all the time?

Spontaneous:By chance + necessity only. A refrigerator forces export of heat from colder body to hotter ones, but that is not at all a spontaneous process or system.

So there you have it: Refrigerators do not work by chance + necessity only. According to Dembski, that means they're intelligent designers. Maybe one of these days my fridge will whip me up a nice creative fruit salad.

--------------"I wasn't aware that classical physics had established a position on whether intelligent agents exercising free were constrained by 2LOT into increasing entropy." -DaveScot

A good rule of thumb is to put your finger ;) to the wind :D and see what the mob hates most—very often that’s where the truth is.

Yeah, they are losing it.

They wouldn't know irony if it put its finger...

OH YEAH RIGHT, DO TEH INFERENCE BEN DOVER RED ROVER. AS MY MOTHER SAYS 'GAYER THAN A ROW OF TANERBACLES'. MY MASTER KIM ILL DEMBSKI JOKES HE COUNTERFEITS TE WHEN HE WHIPS OFF HIS CASSOCK AND COMES ON BOARD MY PIRATE SCHOONER. HE SAID HE WOULD BE HAPPY TO TIE KRISTINE TO THE MAST AND FICKLE HER TETHER-GOLFING.I SMACK ME SOMETIMES dt

There are some obvious targets for the Wiki vandals, such as the articles on George W Bush, Britney Spears, abortion and Islam, as well as more bizarre choices, such as the pages on bigfoot, elephants, bananas and liver. Articles covering current events, such as the death of Anna Nicole Smith, are often sabotaged. The dyslexia article is vandalized daily by anonymous users who enjoy scrambling the text to mess up the spelling.

HO SOMOS DISKLEXIA IS MORE POPULIST TAHN ENTULLIKENT DEESYN.

9 OUT 10 VANDALS CAN'T BE WRONG- eh DT?

--------------The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.Haldane

--------------The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.Haldane

--------------"Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus

Dead white mans fantasy written by a ghost writer portrayed as a docudrama on historical fiction with the actors playing one another out of character.

PS. RTH IS A LESBIAN.

--------------The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.Haldane

One would think that Noah would be able to accomplish just about anything in building his Ark, since the directions supplied by God (the designer) might have included all sorts of clever "hacks" allowing end-runs around the restrictions of conventional physics, chemistry, and biology. Such hacks would allow actions similar to entering and exiting the Matrix (as in, the global simulation depicted in the movie having that name). I can imagine that a clever designer could include pressure points and worm-holes in the structure of the Universe allowing those who knew of their existence to bypass its normal laws.

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What I find scary in all of this is the possibility that the Moral Fabric of the Universe might have similar UEEs embedded in it, allowing someone to kill, rape, get an abortion, watch pornography, take drugs, molest children, or steal without having to pay consequences in the afterlife. This might seem like an impossibility, but, if one allows me to be theological for a moment, we already know "the Lord works in mysterious ways": Jesus had to die for our sins, and someone had to kill Him, and those who killed Him were DOING THE LORD'S WORK. So perhaps Judas and the scourging Centurions are all in Heaven. The Lord also routinely destroys churches (even fundamentalist ones) using tornados. So we can't discount the possibility that a truly evil person might find a UEE allowing him to kill millions, live a thousand years, and then breeze on into the Kingdom of Heaven, perhaps without even having to die first.

If the whole scientist thing falls through I'm going to turn that into a pilot.

He forgot the part where at the end you get to become The Big Head.

--------------Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.

"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."- David Foster Wallace

"Hereâ€™s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."- Barry Arrington

As touching the more basic point, intelligence does not violate entropy, it intentionally creates low entropy systems. (In effect, we are dealing with specialised energy converters under algortihmic or direct intelligent control.)

And, examples are quite commonly encountered. E.g building a house to a plan, or a flyable jumbo jet — compare the odds of such happening [spontaneously!] by a tornado passing through a junkyard.

Kairosfocus is still confusing human notions of order and disorder with thermodynamic entropy. A house has essentially the same entropy as the stack of lumber from which it is made. People prefer the lumber to enclose a space, but a stack of lumber is quite ordered: the thermodynamic order is found in the trillions of wood fiber molecules. And every time you saw a board, or drive a nail, you are breaking trillions of molecular bonds which release energy as waste heat. Not to mention the waste heat created by the heat engines we know as carpenters.

The vast majority of the thermodynamic order in a house was created by trees harnessing sunlight to convert CO2 and H2O into the complex molecules of wood fiber.

A deck of playing cards is often used as an *analogy* to thermodynamic order. But it is just an *analogy*. The actual thermodynamic order in playing cards is not found in the arrangement of ranks and suits, but in the wood fibers that they are made from. To significantly increase the entropy of a deck of cards, don't shuffle them — set them on fire.

But the fact is, the rearrangement of atoms into human brains and computers and the Internet does not violate any recognized law of science except the second law, so how can we discuss evolution without mentioning the one scientific law that applies?

I agree, and have never claimed otherwise. There are tons of self-ordering phenomena in nature. You left out a few adjectives that make all the difference: “unpredictably,” “indefinitely,” “of arbitrary character.”

You are slaying strawmen.

Just to be clear, those adjectives also often apply to non-intelligent thermodynamic systems, e.g. a lightning bolt. The strawman is of your own devising as the original post clearly stated that the 2nd law was subject to an exception for brains, in particular, human brains.

The tubes, i.e. arteries, feeding the brain would be indicative of a heat engine requiring a consistent supply of fuel and oxygen.

There isn't a single one of them that shows how a god .....er teh designer and entropy fit on the same page.

--------------The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.Haldane

Or high entropy. The most important single human technology is fire. In a wood fire, humans release the pent-up energy contained in the wood fibers. This creates heat and light which quickly dissipate. But this quickly dissipating energy, the rapid increase in entropy, is the very reason people burn wood for fuel. It is the control of this process that implies intelligence, not its entropic characteristics. All processes increase entropy somewhere.

Remember that the thermodynamic entropy is a property we can measure in the laboratory. It is a routine analysis, simply involving heating a sample of known weight and measuring the energy input (say with a differential scanning calorimeter), then extrapolating back to absolute zero (where entropy is zero).

Good point. So, Kairosfocus, which has more thermodynamic order; a lump of graphite, or a living human brain?

But we can infer qualities about the Designer from the designs of this genius, found while hunting for Easter eggs at OE (I don't spend much time at that site). Have people already seen this?

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I've really got an ID bug in my bonnet! [I know the feeling.]And yes, as a young man I'm comfortable enough with my sexuality to put it that way.Today I was thinking about design, design, Design! My dogs, they're designed. I'm, well, I'm designed too! It fascinates me that somewhere in a part of the universe inaccessible to the reach of science, we now know that there is an intelligence who has been working in some sort of shop, drafting up design after design and then releasing them here on Earth. Though we know little about the process employed by the designer (except, perhaps, as revealed through ancient texts), it's possible to draw some conclusions about the thinking of the designer from his designs. For one, it's clear the the designer is conservative with his designs. For example, he designed the vertebrate liver and then instantiated it in slightly-modified forms in various groups and sub-groups of vertebrates, modifying its design (and other organ designs) roughly in parallel to what evolutionists misguidedly describe as an "evolutionary tree." Through ID, though, we now know that these differences were design differences. "Oh, I need wings so my birds can fly!" thinks the designer. And so he takes the design for a reptilian forelimb and modifies it, fusing together digits and lightening the structure. "Oh, but I also need wings for my insects" thinks the designer, but this time he decides they might better be formed by modifying a design he created for larval insect gills. This is analogous to the way a programmer programs. He looks around at his code base and says, hmm, this new programming problem I have - what is the closest I've ever come to addressing it in the past? And then he takes some vaguely similar code and modifies it to address the latest programming challenge. To an observer looking at the evidence, the result can look a lot like structures somehow modifying themselves over the course of generations (perhaps through the hocus pocus of natural selection), but anyone with any sense can see that these are modifications of underlying designs that came from OUTSIDE the natural world (though the instructions for those designs ARE given to creatures to pass down to their descendants in the form of DNA). To say creatures are responsible for their own designs is like saying that computer algorithms are responsible for THEIR designs. I admit there is one small difference between computer algorithms and creatures - the latter reproduce, and contain mechanisms in their code to bring this reproduction about, while the former do not. But surely my metaphor is a sound one in all other respects.

The Designah: Bill I need drapes to go with the rug.Bill: Ummm...The Designah: Go to Home Depot and pick up some new ones.Bill: Oh. Okay. [Does it]The Designah: Now move the couch. No, I don't like it there. I need an endtable to go with the couch. Bill: Okay, I obey. [Does it]The Designah: Well, now that doesn't work because it doesn't match any of my etchings. Take it back.Bill: Before I do, may I please ask [praying] is this in chronological or kairological time?The Designah: We are talking withholding shimmies time if you don't do as I say. *Crack of thunder* Bill: [Does it]The Designah: This is fun.

--------------Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip?

AtBC Poet Laureate

"I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive

Though we know little about the process employed by the designer (except, perhaps, as revealed through ancient texts), it's possible to draw some conclusions about the thinking of the designer from his designs. For one, it's clear the the designer is conservative with his designs. For example, he designed the vertebrate liver and then instantiated it in slightly-modified forms in various groups and sub-groups of vertebrates, modifying its design (and other organ designs) roughly in parallel to what evolutionists misguidedly describe as an "evolutionary tree." Through ID, though, we now know that these differences were design differences. "Oh, I need wings so my birds can fly!" thinks the designer. And so he takes the design for a reptilian forelimb and modifies it, fusing together digits and lightening the structure. "Oh, but I also need wings for my insects" thinks the designer, but this time he decides they might better be formed by modifying a design he created for larval insect gills. This is analogous to the way a programmer programs. He looks around at his code base and says, hmm, this new programming problem I have - what is the closest I've ever come to addressing it in the past? And then he takes some vaguely similar code and modifies it to address the latest programming challenge. To an observer looking at the evidence, the result can look a lot like structures somehow modifying themselves over the course of generations (perhaps through the hocus pocus of natural selection),

Isn't it a no-no for Christians to try and second guess what the Disembodied Telic Entity's motives are?

I've thought for a couple weeks that Quintilis is a deep cover troll. That passage doesn't change my mind.

--------------"Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus

Also, Bill is attracted because the guy likes to say stuff that sounds heavy, but is really all gas: "... Throughout evolution, information capable of maintaining its integrity has prevailed over that which was not. Robust information is that which can resist perturbations to maintain its integrity. The ability to react to face perturbations to maintain information makes information adaptive, increasing its probability of maintenance."

If maintaining information integrity is what it's all about, then the best "adaptation" that an organism can do is to get itself frozen in ice.

IOW you start off talking about “non-intelligent systems”, there isn’t any data that would demonstrate this planet is such a system and yet you appear to be using it as an example to support your claim.

So... according to Joseph, the *earth* is an intelligent system. Not the people on the earth, mind you, the earth itself is intelligent *because it is cooling down*?

Note to Dembski: When you post crap like this, you attract brown-nosers like this:

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I just want you to know how much I appreciate you for your courage and for your intellectual honesty. Intelligent Design is an idea with enough reasonable scientific, mathematical, statistical, and logical merit to at least be given a fair hearing in the marketplace of ideas. Obviously the keepers of the status-quo fear you, and your ideas, since there could be no other explanation for the un-deserved vitriol and agression that has come your way, just for trying to make a reasonable argument about something. You are our great champion and our standard-bearer, and I thank you for your un-tiring efforts to find truth, and to speak truth, as best you can see it.

tyharris then goes on to reveal that he doesn't know what an evolutionary algorithm is or why it would give better results than a tornado in a junkyard, but he's hoping that Dembski will come to his blog and chase away the big bad atheists:

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As a mathematician, and an expert on the subject, I was wondering if you could take a minute from your busy schedule to pop in real quick to the comments section and weigh in. I realize that this is a bit like writing to George W. Bush and asking him to personally settle a political argument that you had with your liberal neighbor last saturday out on the porch, but I thought I would at least ask. I figure that if I can get a comment from “Dembski himself”, I win by default unless he manages to drag Dawkins into it somehow.

This is enough to make even an egomaniac like Dembski puke. If he reads this stuff, he's gotta be seriously thinking about retiring from the ID racket.

--------------"I wasn't aware that classical physics had established a position on whether intelligent agents exercising free were constrained by 2LOT into increasing entropy." -DaveScot

Darwinism is based on chance, whether Darwinists want to admit it or not....We get confused because Artifical Selection is a cause, which causes differential reproduction. “Natural Selection” doesn’t cause to differential reproduction; it is the differential reproduction. It doesn’t cause anything further....Anyway, since NS is not a cause of anything, it cannot take a random process and make it non-random. It cannot do anything, since it is an effect only.

The only difference between artificial and natural selection is the selector. But somehow artificial selection is a cause, while natural selection is only an effect. Artificial selection, being a cause, can turn a random algorithm into a non-random algorithm, but natural selection can't do anything.

I'm sold. Where do I sign up for the next ID rally?

--------------"I wasn't aware that classical physics had established a position on whether intelligent agents exercising free were constrained by 2LOT into increasing entropy." -DaveScot

Note to Dembski: When you post crap like this, you attract brown-nosers like this:

Yes, Gershenson's collection of New Age cliches is just a bunch of words glopped together around the very scientific concept of "information".

But what does Dembski see in it? The whole thing is about how the universe, including life, self-organizes, how life is a part of the evolving system of the universe. Maybe that's it, that it's obviously ignorant of evolutionary theory, the kind of rambling nonsense that Charlie Wagner/realpc would write. Yet it has no place for Dembski's little engineering (yet unknowable in any manner--try to make sense of that) God in it, and it is about as godless on the face of it as any quantum computation notion of the universe.

I wonder if these dolts are going to dilute ID too much for any but their most brown-nosing sycophants. As I see it, Gershenson's rambling New Age thoughts are exactly the kind of quasi-religious garbage that most Xians dislike, and what the IDiots try to paint evolutionary theory as being.

And then there's this:

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I've thought for a couple weeks that Quintilis is a deep cover troll. That passage doesn't change my mind.

That's what I was thinking, but then Quintilis's portrayal is essentially what some of the "leading lights of ID" have said, if not in the patently absurd manner that Quintilis writes (uh, yeah, I'd use a leg for my basic design if I were designing a wing--you probably would, Quintilis, if you're an IDiot). There is a problem in ID apologetics, which is that the people who have no sense about these matters will draw out the obvious conclusions from the general statements that the "experts" say in order to cover up the fact that they have no explanation.

So I really don't know about Quintilis. If he starts saying that sure, the designer is conservative, thus he's going to start with a reptilian forelimb instead of a pterodactyl wing (btw, the bird wing does appear to be a better "design" than the pterodactyl wing--more robust against tearing damage), then we know that he's yanking the IDiots around. Let's see, this designer makes the bird and pterodactyl wings out of reptilian forelimbs, the bat wings out of mammalian forelimbs, and never once thinks to make a wing out of a wing. The designer works in mysterious ways.

Quintilis might be doing the same thing, but subtly, when he points out that the "designer" is "conservative" only by using parts of apparent ancestors, strangely adapting the parts that have been made available to evolutionary change. So he may be a deep cover troll, but if he is he's very carefully drawing out the statements of IDists to the same absurd conclusions that a naive camp follower might.

Well, the time draws nigh. DaveScot will be seen in person in May, the 13th to be exact. I will be passing through Austin and will be visiting the Master of Tard (unless he decides to dodge...).

So, I am once again collecting things that people would like to know about DaveTard. These can be science questions, political questions, details about his appearance, whatever. I'm most interested in what his reactions will be to being questioned in person and how he deals with people while not behind a keyboard.

So, anyone with burning questions, let me know here and I'll see what I can do to help you out.